Pottery is made of clay without kaolin. Kaolin is essential to making porcelain (china), but is not essential nor is it used in making pottery. Pottery is an earthenware and very different in structure from porcelain. Pottery is hardened by heat and is made of a mixture of coarse clay, which produces the rough texture from which it gets its common name. Basically, pottery is a pliable earthen clay, not containing kaolin, and is therefore easily molded, shaped, fired, and hardened for commercial use. The epoxy-resinous composition invented herein look like and hardens to the rough consistency of pottery and may be used for filling and mending missing pieces as well as for producing a bisque finish on such porcelain as Sevres, Wedgewood and the like, or a structural arm, leg, hand or an entire figure. The composition invented herein is excellent for restoring and finishing soft paste pottery referred to as faience or majolica.
A great need exists for a mendingand restoring material externally identical or interchangeable with pottery and similar ceramics such as faience, majolica or stoneware, which requires no kiln or firing and which is adhesive, hardenable thermogenetically, air drying, self-curing, and which may be molded and applied by hand. Such a material would be essentially useful for pottery repair and structural or molded finishes stone-like in nature, and as a clay-like material which to fashion animals, hands, feet, figures or identical finishes over broken areas of an existing pottery or ceramic article. This adhesive, clay-like material should harden without being subjected to high temperatures and could be used with considerably convenience and efficiency to repair or modify ceramics and pottery decorated by paint and other materials which would normally be destroyed by subjection to high temperatures or re-firing. The material would desirably exhibit a small coefficient of expansion, matching that of pottery. The material composition desirably could withstand high temperatures to which a china-like object may be subjected in use, such as when being cleaned in a dishwasher. Once cured, the material would be impervious to hot or cold water, acids, stains, saline solutions, and the like.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a material which is capable, without firing, of hardening into a hard and stone-like substance.
It is similarly an object of this invention to provide a composition which sets to a structurally hard mortar-like consistency and adhesiveness and which may be substantially externally indistinguishable from the ceramic to which it is applied.
It is another object of this invention to provide a ceramic compound or mortar which is thermogenetic, and which hardens without heating or baking, fairly rapidly and is impervious to water and changes of temperature.
It is similarly an object of this invention to provide a composition which can be mixed with acrylic base paints to enable a ceramist or china-maker to simulate and restore the ceramic article he is mending, in such a manner that the bisque or stoneware surface of the article is restored to perfection and the damage is invisibilized.
It is another object of this invention to provide a composition having a low coefficient of expansion similar to that of pottery or stoneware.
It is another object of this invention to provide materials for the repair, modification and resurfacing of ceramics, stoneware and the like, without heating of any kind and without high temperature treatment.